Dems' debate

Examining elements leads to question of media gender bias

Are media outlets biased against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton due to her gender? It's an open question and one I'm not prepared to answer. But Tuesday night's debate certainly blew open some angles for examination.

First, there's the time question: Who got more of it? According to The New York Times, Clinton spoke for 30:43 while Sen. Barack Obama spoke for 38:17. So Obama was allowed some 25 percent more time.

Then there's the question of how much file video was used of each candidate. For Clinton, the tally was 56 seconds; for Obama, it was 22. Each was asked to explain past statements he or she had made after being confronted with videotaped proof.

For Clinton, NBC moderators launched the debate by showing two contrasting clips. In the first, she was being gracious toward Obama. In the second, she was ripping into him for misrepresenting her health care plan in mailings to Ohio voters. The question: Which one represented her true feelings about Obama? She reacted mainly with aplomb to the unanticipated question. There was perhaps a glint of surprise in her eyes while she explained she made the comments during two different periods of the campaign.

Obama was asked later in the debate to explain criticisms he leveled against Clinton for casting herself as &quot;co-president&quot; with her husband, while dodging blame for President Bill Clinton's unpopular decisions, such as support for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The Clinton video and questions certainly had a much more obvious element of surprise or &quot;gotcha&quot; in them. The moderators could have posed tougher questions to Obama, but for whatever reason chose not to do so.

The opening video-clip question to Clinton was followed by a question about why a right-wing Web site that day had posted a picture of Obama dressed in African garb. The Web site claimed that it had obtained the picture from the Clinton campaign. Again, an element of surprise. She said she had no knowledge it came from her campaign.

The tough questions for Obama centered on praise he has received from controversial Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Obama has repeatedly denounced Farrakhan's support, so it was not a question by which the moderators could have reasonably assumed he would be surprised.

I'm not prepared to take a stand on whether the two senators were treated similarly or dissimilarly. But one has to wonder how big a factor gender bias is in Clinton's move from front-runner to underdog.

A high-level Democratic strategist told me months ago that internal polls showed some groups of American voters were more likely to vote for an African-American man than a woman of any color.

I was in the U.S. Capitol last week and noticed two portraits side by side. One was of Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, who in 1870 became the first directly elected black member of the House of Representatives. The other was of Jeannette Rankin of Montana, the first woman elected to the House, in 1917. That's a 47-year gap. How prescient, I thought, that history appears to be repeating itself.